Originally Published by Marathon&Beyond October 2006-reprinted with the permission.

Running with the Road to Ruin Runners Club

“What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it. ” Antoine de St. Exupery

These days I run. I lost that for a long while, but now I run long and I train for marathons. Sometimes it’s a specific event and sometimes it’s just that falsely casual, vaguely pretentious “Oh yeah, I run marathons” thing. Many days I put on a Road to Ruin Runners Club (RRRC) hat and maybe a RRRC tee shirt over the Coolmax micro fiber and head out the door.

I ran the Napa Marathon a couple of months ago. I didn’t do very well. I hadn’t trained well enough because of a relentless flu and a fractious attitude. Despite the fog rising out of the darkened valley, shadowy arms and legs moving jerky in anticipation at the start, and eventually the slow fire sun rise over the eastern ridgeline, I dropped out at 16 miles, hallucinatory, overheated, dehydrated and mad as hell. Back at the hotel I was reminded by a runner writer friend of mine that the hardest part of a marathon may be getting to the start line. It has been that way for me.

He pointed out that I had ten minutes to wallow in the failure as I saw it, then I had to pick another race, train for it and run it. He thought Avenue of the Giants, in the Redwood forests of California, eight weeks away, would put things right. I have come through the complexity and destruction that is drug addiction. The simplicity of having a plan, one that is built on getting out of bed, putting on running gear and going out for a run is a great blessing.

I revived the RRRC last year when I started running again in the early mornings. I needed a way to con myself out the door. I thought back to the days when every day began with coffee and a run, when I ran with a bunch of guys in the early morning in Toronto. The RRRC was Jerry, Dan, Ann and an assortment of women with Hungarian names and tempers to match. I went away for a few weeks and came back to find that Eddie had joined in. Over time there was Patrick and Jeff and Cameron and many others who stuck around for awhile and then moved on. We would meet up at 5-5:30 am and head out on a run. No real method to it, just running for the mileage, long and slow, talking marathons and the best places to run wherever we might find ourselves.

I had started running like all kids run; around the block, to the tree, down the road a ways. Nobody ever really lost a race except when Bobby Hatcher got into his stride. Bobby was the postman’s son, skinny, quiet and very fast. Bobby could beat anybody around the block. There was this one day when he and I unaccountably tied on an “around the block and back” race but that was before he went off to St Johns on track scholarship as a 440 guy, a quarter miler, and I learned how to drink Pabst Blue Ribbon.

I had come back to running at one of the inevitable low spots in my career as a movie producer. A movie I had produced was in the middle of a financial partnership fight, which we were losing to the big guys. Things had gotten so tough it seemed that I never slept at all. I went to the store one early morning to get coffee and milk and ran a little bit on the way home. It felt awful but there was a moment when I remembered how good it could feel. I remembered that I had run track in college, that I was better at longer distance than at the sprints, that I was no good at all relative to the better runners on the squad. I had made the team as a reward for showing up at all the practices. This was a lesson I might have learned better than I did. All those many years latter, as life went awry and addiction took hold, the road back began with simply showing up.

The next morning, tired of not sleeping, I managed to run, walk, and stagger down to Bloor Street and back, maybe a mile and a half. After a couple of weeks I ran down to Bloor Street and around Christie Pits, an old sand and gravel pit. That was about a two a half mile run. Over next month or two one circuit of Christie pits became two, three, four. Deep as the Pits are in the ground, forty feet below the street surface, the run around the upper level is easy and flat, offering a wonderful view of the city skyline to the south.

I sometimes saw kids skating on the ice in the Pits which were home to several ball fields and ice rinks. The Pits were historic in Toronto for their role in the infamous ethnic riots of 1933, which began as the result of anti Semitic baiting between the Willowvale team, St. Peters, and the Harbord Park team featuring many members of the Spadina Avenue Gang from the heart of the Jewish community in Toronto. There had been continuing unrest as established Protestant Toronto tried to come to terms with not only the political machinations in Germany but also the ongoing struggle of labor to unionize.

Much of the union movement was thought to be communist inspired and directed by immigrants of all stripes though most particularly by the Jewish community. Tensions were high after the first game. Willowvale won the first game and it supporters took credit for the victory based on their intimidation of the Harbord players. The Spadina Avenue Gang showed up to the second game in strength. The police were known to very quickly quell any labor disturbance based on its Communist intent, but had demonstrated a lack of interest when the point of the disturbance was anti-Semitic or racial. At game’s end a red and black swastika flag was raised and out came the baseball bats and lead pipes. The police stood by for over an hour while the rioters fought.
The long ago gravel pit, ball field battleground, shows no trace of that bloody event. It has no monument, the earth washed clean long ago. It was perfect although the weather was getting wintry. The cold was offset as much by the running in many layers, before micro fiber, as by watching the kids play. It was hard to imagine the anger and violence of the past when watching the kids play shinny on the ice before they went to school.
They were kids of all ages and backgrounds, playing hockey in the dark, playing the game itself, no coaches or parents, brought together by the skating and their dreams. The sounds of skates cutting the ice, the spray of quick stops and slap shots, the kids shouting and carrying on, were as much a part of the place to me as the grey morning light and the icy wind blowing in off Lake Ontario.

One day in late winter, I realized that I was running a long way every day but it was no damn fun. I ran for miles in the cold and dark, feeling much the same on the inside as the winter weather looked on the outside. I mentioned to Dan one day that I was doing some running and he suggested that I join up with Jerry and him for a long run the following day. I knew Dan because he was the distributor of my first movie and we spent a lot of time together. He had told me about his running, about leaving the house very early, meeting up with his running buddy, but I never paid it much mind until that winter.

Dan asked me if I wanted to run the 1981 Longboat 10K on Toronto Island in the Toronto Harbour. The Longboat was named after Tom Longboat; a native Canadian runner who won the Hamilton “Around-the-Bay” race in 1906, the Boston Marathon in 1907 (setting a course record) and the Toronto Marathon in 1906, ’07 and ’08. Longboat also represented Canada at the 1908 Olympic Games. The Longboat 10k had been run for the first time the year before and Jerry and Dan were there. It may be that it was a rite of passage or just something to do in the golden age of Canadian running which was at its peak in the late seventies and early eighties. Jerome Drayton had won at Boston, Jacqueline Gareau had her victory stolen by Rosie Ruiz in Boston and many others were well known in the exploding world of road racing.

We went off to run it on beautiful spring morning. I went out fast despite Dan’s cautionary advice to take it easy at the beginning. A lot of walking followed but somewhere in there it was clear that I wanted to finish and then come back next year get it right. I know I finished because there was picture of me at the finish area, hands on my hips and a large belly draped over my shorts, looking like a candidate for bypass surgery. It made everyone laugh who saw it but it embarrassed me. The next morning I met Dan at his house and he, Jerry and I all ran through the neighborhood and north on Bayview to way past Steeles Ave. It could have been fifteen miles. It might have been eight. I know I loved it.

Jerry, (aka The Chairman), was once three hundred pounds strapped on a 5’6 body, a frenetic charmer who had had a heart attack and in his recovery came to running. This was 1975 or thereabouts. Over the next few years he lost 150 of those pounds by doing what he did best, running and talking. Within a couple of years he had run the New York, Boston, Marine Corps Marathons and several others. His best time was 3:41 or so he says. The Chairman met a girl, Ann, gave her a mink coat on the second date and she became part of the group as did any of the various girlfriends that Dan would bring around. It cost them a fortune in running shoes, but if you bought her a pair of Nikes she was clearly a serious contender for deep relationship. The Chairman married his girl and the rest of us have been jealous ever since, shoes or no shoes, mink or no mink.

I used to think that we weren’t much for runners but we put in 70-80 mile weeks. It turns out that we were pretty good. Dan had run a 3:19 in New York and never more than four hours. Jerry ran several 3:40’s. I guess we trained at 10 minutes per mile and ran races somewhat faster. By the time I came along most of the marathons had been run, Dan and Jerry having run some thirty between them. As it was, I missed a New York and a London, a Chicago. We were always training for something, whether or not we went was another story entirely.

It was new world. I saw the city as never before. We had runs with names, the King Street run, the Bayview run, Rosedale Valley Ravine, the Don River trail system, and many others. We ran to Lester Pearson Airport from downtown, just because. There was no reason to go there in running gear at 5:30 on a winter morning and it was a twenty-two mile run out and back. And there were the mythical runs, Oakville and back, Markham, Caledon, all thirty-two miles plus or something like that. We ran to the end of the trolley lines and out to the Beaches, all in the high teens for distance. We usually ran them on Sunday mornings and then gathered latter to eat big breakfasts at various restaurants or at the Chairman’s house. When the snow was deep and the city silent and glowing white, we put plastic baggies over our socks, put on toques and gloves and went out into the morning to get our miles. Once we ran 14 miles up and back to get bagels from Bagel World on Bathurst and Wilson, all uphill from Bloor Street, so that we could earn the right to sit and watch the NYC Marathon on TV. There were trips and all kinds of events, mostly planned and discussed at length and some actually happened.

I remember that many of our runs would bring us west along Danforth Ave, over the Prince Edward Viaduct, which sits astride ” …a glacio-fluvial valley” and has “ … a certain coalescence of natural and architectural greatness, awe inspiring in its grandeur” according to a local critic at its opening in 1913. It is famous still, because of its Beaux Arts architecture, its stormy political history during construction, its sightlines. The centerpiece of the poet/novelist Michael Ondaatje’s wonderful book , In the Skin of a Lion, the passion and grandeur of the city’s love affair with progress is revealed in all it’s painful glory.

The Viaduct turned us southeast along Bloor for the run in. Mostly we could get the sunrise coming in over the city towers to the south and the glow of the residential neighborhoods to the north. It was a special time of day, as it is for those who run in the early morning. We were lucky to be part of it.

We met for years at a donut shop on Yonge St. that had parking available. Dan and the Chairman used to meet at a Squash Club parking garage when there were just the two of them. Mysterious and a little like the movie All the President’s Men is how it struck me when I first heard about it. While it made me laugh, under the surface it was clear that each of us had our own demons and running was a way to get closer to them, put them at bay for awhile and get on with things. Often the runs were more like an ad hoc support group than they were anything else, this before Robert Bly and naked drumming

We all had highly speculative careers in real estate and movies and so there were a lot of big bust days and a few big win nights. All were celebrated and shared. I know I went through a divorce and the beginning of hard drug use which I kept hidden for nearly twenty years. Dan and the Chairman each had had their own troubles and there were other occasional runners whose lives were unruly, who found with us that the run in the early morning was a way to have some peace and some support in an often difficult world.

There was this morning when I heard someone coming in through the back door. It was 4:30 am and I was not alone. My first thought was that Danielle, warm and new and sleeping gentle in my bed, had told me she wasn’t married. Terrified to the core I went to see what was going on. It was the Chairman. He didn’t sleep very much it seemed and this morning his usual all night coffee shop had pitched him out. He came to get me so we could get some miles before the others showed up at 5:30. It never occurred to me that it was strange to leave the door unlocked, to have the Chairman walk in and to go out running in the snow with him.

Even though I had just met someone I wanted to spend time with, who intrigued me, someone who was a possibility for a pair of Nikes, I went. I told him this as we headed up Avenue Road, and he said, “Run first, spend time later.” It was careless of me as it turned out, but it made sense at the moment. Running came first despite, or maybe because of, the constant search of Nike candidates. If I had known then what I came to learn I would have seen that the addiction in me touched everything I did despite the appearance of good times with the gang.

If it sounds elegiac, I guess it is. In the end the group broke up as the Chairman had kids, Dan found a succession of girlfriends and sadly, family tragedy. Eddie appeared to go broke and went back to Phoenix before moving on to a new opportunity in London. I came slowly and steadily face to face with the gaping hole in my life when my kids moved out west with their mother. At one point in 1984, Dan and I had a conflict about a woman neither of us cared about and we both used it to trash the other. The group split leaving only the Chairman and me and occasionally some of his “in from the far west for some time in the big city” in-laws to run with us. I moved out to Vancouver to be with my kids. Eddie and Jerry still ran together. That ended when the deals ran out for both of them and life changed course for all involved.

The Road to Ruin Runners Club was a state of mind and for awhile a wonderful, oddly compassionate place to be. The logo suggests a rainbow with edges and a runner heading toward it. The pot of gold is not necessarily what it appears to be since the rainbow is jagged, just like life itself, full of color and promise and sometimes pain and blood in both the running and the living. We were friends for awhile and shared the world and all its gifts as we headed out in the mornings. What we lost was a companionship that was never to be replaced and properly so I guess. There is red on the bottom of the shoe of the new rainbow runner and I know that for me it means that in the getting from here to there blood is spilled and sometimes the path is so very difficult.

Last year I came back to running, in North Texas, where I live now. I seem to be free of the dragons that had consumed so much of my life since my journey on the road to ruin began. If I imagined that I was heading out the door to run with the RRRC I would actually get the run. I asked a friend to recreate the RRRC logo. The red shoe and the runner facing into the rainbow make it real for me these days.

I trained for and ran the Anchorage Mayor’s Midnight Sun Marathon for Team in Training. It went well until mile 13 and the years caught up with me in the form of Achilles problems that brought me to a walk. At that point I was on five hour pace, not much by comparison to the early days but plenty good for the first one back. When I came up Insult Hill to close out Anchorage I was able, maybe for the first time in 20 years, to let the past go, to take what was best in it and leave the rest by the side of the road. My last mile was my fastest mile of the run.

I put on a black Road to Ruin tee and walked. My first calls were to my kids. My next call was to the Chairman. Being the guy he is he first told me how great it was that I ran, how he had run a four “something” with an Achilles problem and that he was getting ready to maybe train for another run. It was perfect in its understanding of who we were, who we are and what we have been to each other. The RRRC was tongue in cheek when we made it up but underneath we accepted that we were not perfect, that life was hard and made harder still by the way we lived it. The RRRC had been less about the miles and the races and more, I finally realized, about friendship and love in some very hard times.

I spoke to Dan the other day and Eddie too. Eddie told me he doesn’t run anymore because of bad knees; Dan much the same although he plays lots of tennis. The Chairman and Ann and I are still close. He still coaches me on losing weight and running slow. Despite his being nearly seventy and no longer able to run, I can hear the distances run and the laughter coming down the phone line like turning for home on Bloor St., breathing easy, laughing out loud, rolling into the promise of the rising sun.

Next week, May 1, 2005, on the fourth anniversary of my getting clean and sober, I will run the Avenue of the Giants Marathon with some friends. We met at the start line in Anchorage, discovered that along with the running we shared recovery from alcohol and drugs. I will tell them about my friends in Texas who are runners like us, in recovery . None of us ever made it to the race in the old days, never made it to the start line. It’s different now. I know that when I get off the bus in the pre-dawn, breath steaming in the cool morning air, I will listen to the excited, hopeful, nervous chatter of the runners, I will see the ghostly movements of bodies in the mist, drink in the silence of the big trees. I will remember for a moment the countless early morning runs with my friends, then and now, and be quiet with the gift of being here. All this might go toward easing my own nerves about what the run will bring.

It was clear, is clear, to me that running is in our human cells, part of our biology, our evolutionary imagination. We are part of something much greater than ourselves when we get out of the door and start out down the road, across the field, up the lane, over the next rise. Rudyard Kipling says that if we should “….fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run, yours is the earth and everything that’s in it.” The road to ruin has become the road to what…redemption, reconciliation, recovery? Possibilities of all these I think, inside the ineffable sense of better days ahead.